Month: August 2015

Discussion about the puzzle behind the previous post led to this question: Is it possible to construct a similar question, where there are three of five values ...

Here’s an interesting mean/median question. Assume your lab assistant took five readings, but only recorded three of them: -3, 5, and 7. The assistant als...

In this post, I discuss the Sleeping Beauty problem, which explores how perception can affect assessment of probabilities. First, the video that introduced me t...

Today, I’m going to write up a quick geometric proof. Here’s the original puzzle that inspired it. Given that \(AC = AB\) and that \(AE = DE = CD = ...

Elementary school students spend most of their time working with counting numbers, that is, the non-negative integers. As students progress through secondary sc...

I often discuss mathematics with my six-year-old son. As a teacher, my goal is to try to pinpoint where it is that student understandings go astray. As a parent...

A common mistake students make when adding fractions is to add both the numerators and the denominators (I’ll use a special symbol to reinforce that this ...

I noted in an earlier post that in 1893, Milne used “are” as a casual speech reading of the equality sign, rather than the “is” that I&#...

This is a post on language and linguistics, one of my other passions. This is also largely an educated riff; there has been a lot written on this subject, and I...